(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for supporting actual effect information determination, and a machine readable recording medium with an actual effect information determination supporting program recorded therein, all of which are suitable for use in a multiplexer having the function of multiplexing communication lines, and the redundancy function.
(2) Description of the Related Art
In type I carriers, type II carriers, electric-power companies, Japan Highway Public Corporation, Ministry of Construction, and other public institutions, individual wide area networks are generally operated by a transit network with a hierarchical configuration including a plurality of units having the function of multiplexing communication lines and the redundancy function. The transmission units in the transit network respectively offer communication services through a plurality of routes.
In such a business offering the communication service, the service may temporarily be stopped due to switching between the networks, or a problem on the network in order to, for example, enhance or maintain the network, or make preparations (tests) for inauguration of the service. Hence, it is important to provide a communication service to obtain information about the presence or absence of a line out of service, or information about the instantaneous service outage, thereby taking an appropriate action on a position at which a failure occurs, or providing necessary information to users.
In general, when the service is stopped, information detected in the transmission units is summarized, and the summarized information is used to detect the most significant path, the most significant unit, and the most significant hierarchy in each of the transmission units. Thus, it is possible to provide network capability outage information by retrieving from a database communication lines passing through paths, the units, and hierarchies. The database previously holds interconnections of the units configuring the network, a multiplexing structure, and interconnections of the hierarchies.
However, there is a problem in that, in the network providing the communication services as described above, it is impossible to create information to be stored in the database unless an operator is perfectly familiar with a multiplexing mechanism for the transmission units configuring the network, redundancy, a network configuration, and so forth.
Further, there is another problem in that appropriate information can not be provided due to a lack of information stored in the database, or inconsistency between information in the time-varying network configuration and the contents of the database. In addition, a further problem is that the database must be reorganized (updated) in order to realize real-time processing at a high speed, and several days may be required from storage processing for the database to inauguration of the database.
Besides, when switching of database is made according to, for example, a variation in redundancy mechanism of the transmission unit, or an alternative routing unit, database switching information is retrieved after the database is adapted to unit switching information or route switching information. Hence, as the database becomes larger, a longer time is required for an operation to follow the varying network configuration and retrieval, resulting in delayed provision of the information, and delayed actions on problems.